<p>An application of the syntactic method to electrocardiogram (ECG) pattern recognition and parameter measurement is presented. Solutions to the related problems of primitive pattern selection, primitive pattern extraction, linguistic representation, and pattern grammar formulation are given. Attribute grammars are used as the model for the pattern grammar because of their descriptive power, founded upon their ability to handle syntactic as well as semantic information. This approach has been implemented and the performance of the resultant system has been evaluated using an annotated standard ECG library.</p>